Public Policy is social agreement written down as a universal guide for social action. We at The Policy ThinkShop share information so others can think and act in the best possible understanding of "The Public Interest."

The United States of America today heard from the one state that matters–the federal government, our nation state, regarding fairness and equality for all its citizens under the federal tax code.

“All same-sex couples who are legally married will be recognized as such for federal tax purposes, even if the state where they live does not recognize their union, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday.

It is the broadest federal rule change to come out of the landmark Supreme Court decision in June that struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and a sign of how quickly the government is moving to treat gay couples in the same way that it does straight couples.”

Do you speak Spanish? America, like the rest of the “Americas,” speaks Spanish quite fluently, prevalently and often. Despite the illusion that North America is monolingual and that being monolingual is somehow more “American,” the truth is that America has been multilingual for hundreds of years prior to the landing of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, followed by May and Flower–the Mayflower, that is, much later.

The original experience of the inhabitants of the Southwest, for example, included migration patterns by the native peoples of Central America across the Rio Grande and all the way up into the Dakotas and back. For over a thousand years, the natives of what much later became North America spoke numerous languages and roamed what would become America. The first settlement at St. Augustine, you could say, established the continent’s first European language–Español.

St. Augustine was founded forty-two years before the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, and fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts – making it the oldest permanent European settlement on the North American continent.

Today, America’s strong and vibrant Spanish heritage is prospering as many of us feel right at home speaking the original colonial language. According to the Pew Foundation,

“A record 37.6 million persons ages 5 years and older speak Spanish at home, according to an analysis of the 2011 American Community Survey by the Pew Research Center.

Spanish is, by far, the most spoken non-English language in the U.S. The next most spoken non-English languages are Chinese (with 2.8 million speakers), Hindi, Urdu or other Indic languages (2.2 million), French or French Creole (2.1 million), and Tagalog (1.7 million).

The number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. has grown rapidly in recent decades, reflecting the arrival of new immigrants from Latin America and growth in the nation’s Hispanic population. Today 34.8 million Hispanics ages 5 and older speak Spanish at home.

However, not all Spanish speakers are Hispanic. According to our analysis, some 2.8 million non-Hispanics speak Spanish at home today. That places Spanish at the top of the list of non-English languages spoken by non-Hispanics along with Chinese and ahead of all other languages.

(The U.S. Census Bureau measure of non-English language use captures how many people say a language other than English is spoken in the home but does not capture how well or how often the language is spoken).

Who are the 2.8 million non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home? Some 59% trace their ancestry to non-Spanish European countries such as Germany, Ireland, England and Italy. An additional 12% say they are of African American descent. Nonetheless, about one-in-five (18%) non-Hispanic Spanish speakers trace their heritage to a Spanish-speaking country. By comparison, among the non-Hispanic U.S. population ages 5 and older, about two-thirds (64%) trace their ancestry to non-Spanish European countries, 13% say their ancestry is African American and 1% trace their heritage to a Spanish-speaking country.

Nine-in-ten (89%) of non-Hispanic Spanish speakers were born in the U.S., a share similar to that for all non-Hispanics ages 5 and older (91%).

The racial composition of non-Hispanic Spanish speakers mirrors that of the U.S. non-Hispanic population. Overall, three-quarters (77%) of non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home are white, 14% are black, and 9% say they belong to some other racial group. Among the non-Hispanic U.S. population ages five years and older, 76% are white, 14% are black, and 9% are some other race.

Many non-Hispanic Spanish speakers reside in a household where at least one other member is Hispanic. Overall, 26% of non-Hispanic Spanish speakers live in these types of households. By comparison, just 3% of all non-Hispanics ages 5 and older live in such households.

Three-in-ten (28%) non-Hispanics Spanish speakers who are married live with a Hispanic spouse. By comparison, only 2% of non-Hispanics are living with a Hispanic spouse.

When it comes to English proficiency, eight-in-ten (80%) non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home say they speak English “very well”, 11% say they speak English “well”, and 9% say they speak English “not well” or do not speak English. This compares with 96% of all non-Hispanics 5 years and older who speak English only or speak it “very well”, 2% who speak English “well”, and 2% who speak English “not well” or do not speak English.”

Are we our brother’s keeper? America seems to be increasingly divided in its opinions in what happens, and even in simply taking notice.

The verdict in Florida regarding the shooting of an unarmed teen should raise concern and key questions about guns, court systems, legal justice, race relations, and many other issues of import for the state of our Nation’s social fabric and for the future of an increasingly diverse if separate America. This separation seems to include what we notice and what we care about.

Be sure to visit the Policy ThinkShop for commentary on the importance of what happened in Florida for how after the legal system addressed the death of Trayvon Martin millions of people might now see America and how America sees millions of people through the eyes of our local police departments and justice systems.

The Pew Foundation has released a troubling survey about apathy and neglect for matters that should matter to all of us…

“The final days of the trial of George Zimmerman, which concluded July 13 with a verdict of not guilty, attracted relatively modest public interest overall. In a weekend survey, 26% say they were following news about the trial very closely.

This is lower than interest in the initial controversy over Trayvon Martin’s shooting when it erupted last year. In March 2012, 35% said they followed news about Martin’s shooting very closely.

However, the story has consistently attracted far more interest among blacks than whites – and that remained the case in the trial’s final days. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to say they tracked news about the Zimmerman trial very closely (56% vs. 20%).

Moreover, fully 67% of blacks say they watched at least some live coverage of the Zimmerman trial, compared with 38% of whites. About one-in-five blacks (21%) say they watched “almost all’’ of the trial coverage; just 5% of whites reported watching almost all of it.

The Pew Research Center survey was conducted July 11-14 among 1,002 adults. In 237 interviews conducted July 14, the day after the Zimmerman verdict, 29% say they were following news about the trial very closely.

The Zimmerman trial and Trayvon Martin shooting have drawn less interest than some other racially charged incidents in recent years, including the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict in 1992 (70% very closely) and O.J. Simpson’s arrest in 1994 (48%).”

We never think of ourselves as strangers, but others around us at one time or another surely will. For thousands of years groups of human beings have found ways to bond and build unity. Unfortunately, at the same time that we form the “we,” the “them” or the “other” is automatically formed. That is the fundamental basis of discrimination, judgement, bias and, yes, racism. It’s us against them. It’s “you and I are not the same and I don’t trust you.”

On that unfortunate night when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin met face to face, they both saw a stranger. George Zimmerman had already been armed and ready for “the stranger” and acted accordingly when he encountered a startled Trayvon Martin. Not much can really be said about that night because the only real witness was not a witness at all but a participant observer overwhelmed by his own fear, anger and pursuit of “the stranger in the night.”

Racism is but a word and concept that when put to the test of thought and reason falls short of describing the totality and complexity of many of the situations it, perhaps ironically, so often is a vital part of. Racism as an explanatory concept falls short because outside of “the human race” all the other constructs relating to race do not hold up to scientific scrutiny. There is only one kind of human being, though we are all quite different. Historically those differences have divided us and caused some of us to treat other people in inhumane ways. The construct of “White person” has been used historically to bring together a normally disparate collection of people. The early KKK included a diversity of people from different religions and ethnicities. This collection of disparate people were united in their apposition to the empowerment and liberation of antebellum South people–African Americans who had been enslaved because they were brought to America as muscle for work and were labeled, legally, as somewhere between animal and human. There is much psychosis and ill will in the history of the American Republic and as inheritors of that legacy, White people (however one defines the complex category) must live with that history. Black people must also live with that burden as victims and objects of hostility. As Americans, we all have a responsibility to address that past and to make sure that it does not dominate our present or future. There is no more important a challenge for the future of this Republic. America cannot go on closing its doors and incarcerating people who do not fit an antiquated norm.

America must work on reinventing itself and forging a culture that will better define what it expects from its citizens and one that is more attentive and inclusive of what it needs from the future than what it needs from its past. America must be more forward looking and embracing of people’s differences. That will not be easy… but it must happen. It cannot be done piecemeal through divisive movements and competition… Stakeholders in a future multicultural America must forge a value system that can be taught at home by parents, in school by teachers, at religious gatherings by spiritual leaders and in corporate America by managers. America increasingly looks different and we must figure out how to make the differences among us work if we are going to stay competitive in a competitive world.

Can America talk its way out of the race problem?

In important ways, racism speaks to the fears and phobias held deeply by people who fear black people, especially men America labels “black.” The reasons White people fear them may be debatable, but their discomfort with “the black stranger” cannot be explained away.

George Zimmerman was afraid and emotional enough that night, that he could not simply say: Good evening. What is your name? I am the neighborhood watch guy and I do not know you? Can we talk? Perhaps he could have said something like that and a simple conversation could have unraveled. Perhaps avoiding the confrontation that ensued.

When a person feels strong and negative feelings about another person, because they are strange and foreign to them, it is understandable. But when a person feels these feelings about a person who is black or African American, that person is acting on prior perceptions and images that are a part of American history and we, as a Nation, hardly know how to talk about that.

To be sure, the “we” here is those of us who frame these issues purely as racial, with little attention to the complexities that lead to intergroup mistrust and hostilities between so called “ethnic” or “racial” groups and the mainstream which is still presumed to be “White.”

But history is not simply Black and White. America is still not able to get over its “Black and White psychosis.” The mainstream American hegemonic culture has not processed differences and cultural conflicts between groups very well. That is the most deleterious outcome of its psychosis. Although White and Black hostilities are well documented and talked about, the lynching of Native Americans and Mexican Americans that went on in the mid and southwestern states is rarely mentioned. American consciousness and history is so twisted that today Hollywood portrays yesterday’s predominantly “brown” cowboys in the erroneous image of blond haired and blue eyed John Wayne. Intergroup competition, mistrust, hatred and violence are as old as the New England witch hunts, Southern White terror and abuse and exploitation of immigrants to America.

But intergroup competition and mistrust, intergroup hostilities in the face of reason and laws is not new. What is new is the proliferation of guns in our country–both urban and suburban, legal and illegal. Mistrust and divisions between groups that increasingly fuel and dominate our electoral politics and discourse do not bode well for an America that is already on guard about teenagers shooting up our schools and theaters, disgruntled and unstable young people blowing up Federal Buildings in Oklahoma, and homeland terrorism born of immigrants from anticommunism wars that armed and trained religious minorities throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East. History is very much with us and we are doomed to repeat it. The violence that ensued between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin is very much embedded in racial history and mistrust. Mistakes happen, but guns have to be carrier by choice and how we define and treat one another in any situation has roots in how we were brought up and how “the other” looks and “feels” to us.

Hope lies in the hearts and minds of today’s young. But it will not survive for long if we allow police departments, States like Florida and the media establishment to make the mistakes and the politically motivated laws that promote vigilantism and hostility between neighbors. For example, the stand your ground law apparently does. What kind of society have we become that we allow excessive use of violence no matter what? In a diverse society where so many of us treat one another as “the other” or “the stranger” we cannot afford laws and court systems that allow anyone to define another person, and based on how they define that person, feel fear for their lives and kill them. That is insane and that is what is wrong with the Florida court system today.

Something is terribly wrong in American justice today. On the one hand, there is this slavery and civil rights history that is somewhat alien to most of today’s young people (today’s young people, of any race or ethnicity) and is somewhat stuck in the past for the rest of us. Civil rights is no longer about black and white. The country is much different today and in important ways the current generation that will matter, in terms of what happens in the next quarter century (young people between the ages of 15 to 35) is up at bat.

What are young people on all sides and from all communities going to do to make the future America kinder and gentler? What ever happened to community and neighborhood?

Florida justice on trial as the nation watches the justification of profiling and following that led to a senseless killing.

“George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, igniting a national debate on racial profiling and civil rights, was found not guilty late Saturday night of second-degree murder. He was also acquitted of manslaughter …”

Educational attainment, the schools we attend, the neighborhoods we grow up in, and the family that shapes us, all represent the context which gives our language meaning, its connotations. But the dictionary and the official meanings in it is an important shared frame of reference; or is it? In search of meaning, intentions and aggression, we often find ourselves in front of the proverbial mirror of shame. There always seems to be plenty of blame to go around when people are mean to one another. But to complain about UFC culture seems to go beyond reason to a place where words or meaning may no longer hold much substance.

Life in today’s diverse America is becoming quite interesting and the language to explain it increasingly seems to fall short. Public behavior, especially public behavior tied to corporate profits and corporate values, has ramifications beyond colloquialisms and local vernacular. Because the spoken word is usually magnified and made more powerful when it is repeated by those who have the means, people who speak to the wrong person (s) or in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, get crucified. Someone is always ready to listen and to register a complain for all the good people to weigh in and render a collective judgement. What passes for conversation, if inelegant or far from eloquent, in the confines of comrades and buddies in local corners or man caves, can be quite the consternation in a public setting–even when it is said in a spectacle of violence, and mostly indecency, displayed for the public palate. Apparently it is ok to beat another human being nearly to death but it is not okay to call them names? What ever happened to sticks and stones will break my bones, etc., etc. etc. We have reached the day when the tongue is mightier than the sword and the public sense of decency is measured by what Oscar Wilde himself may have seen as ironic and inane.

Tell us here at The Policy ThinkShop what you THINK???

“UFC fighter Nate Diaz (above) was suspended by the mixed martial arts body on Thursday night for earlier in the week using a gay slur against another fighter. That’s typically where a manager or someone else would step in and get the athlete to apologize and …”

The army has relied mostly on brawn for the greater part of its existence. Its culture has been shaped by a resilient gender segregation that the dependence on male power has perpetuated. However, today’s army is increasingly computer and technologically driven–gender may be mattering less and less. Drones are replacing the boys but the boy culture changes much slower than the technology. The values and psychology of today’s army boys is tethered to the attitudes which their parents have embedded in them. Those ties cannot be broken. They can be mediated by rules and incentives (negative and positive), but they cannot be completely eradicated in the average soldier who joins a tradition of male discipline and aggression honored and admired by the women in their lives and expected by their male heroes.

To be sure, today’s army would look like camp scouts compared to the savage herds that define the history and origins of war itself. But it is an uncomfortable place for young heroic women who grew up in an age that promises them equality in all areas of their lives. Ironically, the fight to change the deep male traditions that form our fighting forces may be more difficult than field combat itself where they can pull a trigger or a button and wipe out a dozen men they may not even get to visualize or even hear. Such is the challenge for today’s army–we have technological power and intellectual power beyond our enemies but the real enemy our army faces today is our inability to get along as fellow patriotic Americans or simply human beings. Of course, that is also the reason we go to war against other nations in the first place.

“Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered top military chiefs on Friday to redouble their effort to address the problem of sexual assault, saying the frequency and perceived tolerance of the crime was …”

This is especially interesting since there appears to have been a voter suppression strategy promoted by some Republicans in various parts of the country.

“About two in three eligible blacks (66.2 percent) voted in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites who did so, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today. This marks the first time that blacks have voted at a higher rate than whites since the Census Bureau started publishing statistics on voting by the eligible citizen population in 1996.

These findings come from The Diversifying Electorate — Voting Rates by Race and Hispanic Origin in 2012 (and Other Recent Elections), which provides analysis of the likelihood of voting by demographic factors, such as race, Hispanic origin, sex, age and geography (specifically, census divisions). The report draws upon data from the November 2012 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement and looks at presidential elections back to 1996. Using the race definitions from 1968 and the total voting-age population, whites voted at higher rates than blacks in every presidential election between 1968, when the Census Bureau began publishing voting data by race, and 1992.

Blacks were the only race or ethnic group to show a significant increase between the 2008 and 2012 elections in the likelihood of voting (from 64.7 percent to 66.2 percent). The 2012 increase in voting among blacks continues what has been a long-term trend: since 1996, turnout rates have risen 13 percentage points to the highest levels of any recent presidential election. In contrast, after reaching a high in 2004, non-Hispanic white voting rates have dropped in two consecutive elections. Between 2008 and 2012, rates for non-Hispanic whites dropped from 66.1 percent to 64.1 percent. As recently as 1996, blacks had turnout rates 8 percentage points lower than non-Hispanic whites.

Overall, the percentage of eligible citizens who voted declined from 63.6 percent in 2008 to 61.8 percent in 2012.

Both blacks and non-Hispanic whites had voting rates higher than Hispanics and Asians in the 2012 election (about 48 percent each).”

What do barbie dolls and the Heritage Foundation have in common? Barbie dolls are to sexism as the heritage foundation is to racism — they both used to be bastions of each ideology but today they appear increasingly useless and irrelevant.

The Atlantic Wire reports that the Heritage Foundation is running for cover as the facts come out about one Jason Richwine, a former Harvard student who wrote his Ph.D. thesis exploring the presumed intellectual inferiority of Hispanics in America. The Heritage Foundation used the controversial Harvard former student to publish a recent report arguing about the so called costs of immigration for America.

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank born in the aftermath of the Nixon era when America saw itself through the eyes of a popular media, government and academia largely of European ancestry and xenophobia towards all things not “White” or of European origin. This world view was forged at a time when civil rights at home and Vietnam abroad crushed the former American dream which was forged in a 1950s America which was being torn asunder by hippie kids and non-White civil rights marchers.

Today the modern expression of these reactionary movements are anti immigration, states rights and anti affirmative action diatribes that fly in the face of the facts of an America that needs every once of talent and muscle from its growing “brown majority.”

Recent demographic reports show that Rodriguez is now the most numerous last name held by new born babies in our country. Tomorrow is here and the Heritage Foundation seems to be trying to cover the overwhelming historical truth with an increasingly ineffective ideological argument about the size of a broken barbie doll umbrella.

“Jason Richwine, co-author of a controversial report from the Heritage Foundation that criticized the potential cost of immigration reform, has resigned from the organization. The resignation follows revelations that Richwine’s college dissertation argued that …”

The Pew Forum on Religion continues to bring us facts and figures to enlighten our view of the religious world which is often clouded by a sensationalist media and the rose colored lenses of young ambitious journalists trying to move up the career ladder or older ones stuck in yesterday’s phobias and mired in a short and myopic view of a changing modern world where the acts of the few motivate and move the masses through the loud megaphone that is our entertainment driven media establishment…. Read the Pew article and tell us what you think…

“A new Pew Research Center survey report finds high levels of concern about religious extremism among Muslims in the North Caucasus area of Russia and the neighboring Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The survey also finds that few Muslims across the region support the use of violence against civilians in the name of Islam, though there is somewhat more support for suicide bombing and similar violence among Muslims in Kyrgyzstan than in Russia or Kazakhstan.”

Affirmative action rears its ugly head once again as the usually intellectually rigorous London Economist magazine publishes an article (link below) making an argument on the deleterious effects of affirmative action policies for beneficiaries, institutions and societies in general.

The main problem with the article is that it sees people of color (or ethnic minorities) as both the “weak classes” and the beneficiaries of these policies. The article writer fails to understand that a good number of people belonging to the so called “majority” or “white” as the article calls them, are also tremendously disadvantaged and cyclically in poverty by region and sometimes by religious group or region of the country (Catholics compared to Episcopalians and people from the Appalachia region compared to New Yorkers).

The overwhelming majority of people in America are so called “White.” Poverty is not simply a skin color problem. Affirmative action is not perfect and plenty of examples can be found of cases in which it is abused or inappropriately taken advantage of. This does not mean that there’s no need to address historical differences between groups that have experienced circumstances which precluded their development in the educational and business fields, for example.

When society invests in the children of the poor to ensure that future generations can continue to prosper and contribute to society in greater ways we all benefit.

When specific groups have been locked out for so long that lack of education, sophistication or opportunity defines their relationship to society, then society has a responsibility to address that condition. Whether we see that “responsibility” as a moral or as a self interested proposition, does not really matter. The fact is that when societies invest in their citizens they benefit all of society and improve their lot vis a vis other societies who experience the drag and social dislocation caused by an underclass. The following article in the Economist fails to understand this simple logic. Read it and tell us what you think?

“ABOVE the entrance to America’s Supreme Court four words are carved: “Equal justice under law”. The court is pondering whether affirmative action breaks that promise. The justices recently accepted a case concerning a vote in Michigan that banned it, and will …”

No one ever talks about it. It is taboo. Or perhaps, it is not important in our mostly Western European culture.

As we have developed a culture of fear, xenophobia, and antipathy towards foreigners, we have begun to kill our American Dream. We dislike people who look poorly dressed, “dark,” or otherwise not like “us.” We forget, or perhaps our history books don’t explain and our grandparents did not share, that most people who came through Elis Island came here with few belongings, lived in very modest quarters and felt as isolated and alienated as today’s monolingual and “lost in America” recent immigrant population.

Mexicans, Haitians, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Puerto Ricans, many, many, groups are portrayed as “less than American” and continue to be seen as different from the mainstream ideal. An ideal that may now be shattered after the savages who attacked innocent people in Boston. The facts are developing at this time. But the monsters in the two FBI photos are nothing like the “dark guy” ridiculously and irresponsibly described by CNN’s John King with Wolf Blitzer supporting.

“I want to be very careful about this, because people get very sensitive when you say these things,” King said Wednesday. “I was told by one of these sources who is a law enforcement official that this is a dark-skinned male.”

America is now more diverse than ever. It’s mainstream leadership is woefully out of touch with the silent growing segment of the population that is destined to inherit our tomorrow.

The Boston Globe reported a story that confirms the damage mainstream media does to our fabric when they echo the fears and phobias suffered by less educated Americans… By less educated we don’t mean did not go to College–we mean people who were raised and educated by parents and schools that failed. Some of these people have high degrees and are millionaires who lead our nightly broadcasts…

“Every day, Heba Abolaban of Malden checks on her family in war-strafed Syria, where water, bread and electricity are in short supply. She was far more worried about them than about herself on Wednesday morning when she put her baby daughter in a stroller and headed into the sunshine to a play group with a friend.But as they strolled down Commercial Street, an angry-faced man charged toward the petite woman, his hand balled into a fist. He punched her hard in the shoulder and screamed curses inches from her face. Then he pointed at her and …”

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